Clotel, or, The president's daughter
William Wells Brown (Author), Geoffrey Sanborn (Editor)
"As nearly all of its reviewers pointed out, Clotel was an audience-minded performance, an effort to capitalize on the post-Uncle Tom's Cabin "mania" for abolitionist fiction in Great Britain, where William Wells Brown lived between 1849 and 1854. The novel tells the story of Clotel and Althesa, the fictional daughters of Thomas Jefferson and his mixed-race slave. Like the popular and entertaining public lectures that Brown gave in England and America, Clotel is a series of startling, attention-grabbing narrative "attractions." Brown creates in this novel a delivery system for these attractions, in an effort to draw as many readers as possible towards anti-slavery and anti-racist causes. Rough, studded with caricatures, and intimate with the racism it ironizes, Clotel is still capable of creating a potent mix of discomfort and delight. This edition aims to makes it possible to read Clotel in something like its original cultural context. Working Geoffrey Sanborn's Introduction discusses Brown's extensive plagiarism of other authors in composing Clotel, as well as his narrative strategies in the novel."-- Provided by publisher
Domestic fiction
1 online resource (278 pages) : illustrations
9781315285122, 9780765633040, 1315285126, 0765633043
959428588
Print version:
Introduction
William Wells Brown : a brief chronology
A note on the text
Clotel; or, The president's daughter
Appendix A. Contemporary reviews
Appendix B. Slave-auction scenes
Appendix C. The aesthetic of attractions
Appendix D. Brown and his audiences
Appendix E. Plagiarism